Allergenicity of native and recombinant major allergen groups 1 and 2 of Dermatophagoides mites in mite sensitive Thai patients.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Natural allergenic extracts using for diagnosis and immunotherapy may have batch-to-batch variations and contaminations with unrefined allergens or non-allergenic components. Thus, recombinant allergen is believed to overcome these shortcomings. In this study, native and recombinant allergens of group 1 and 2 of Dermatophagoides mites were produced and their allergenicities were compared. METHODS Native allergens were prepared by MAb affinity chromatography. All recombinant allergens were produced in E. coli expression system. IgE reactivities of these allergens were determined by IgE-ELISA. RESULTS The native and recombinant Der p 1, Der p 2, Der f 1, Der f 2 had molecular weights of approximately 25, 15, 25 and 15 kDa, respectively. IgE reactivities of nDer p 1, nDer f 1, rDer p 1 and rDer f 1 were 96.67%, 90%, 43.33% and 46.67%, respectively. Allergenicities of nDer p 2, nDer f 2, rDer p 2 and rDer f 2 were 86.67%, 96.43%, 76.67% and 89.29%, respectively. The findings indicated that recombinant group-1 products were minor allergens which revealed no correlation with their native forms. In contrast, recombinant group-2 allergens were major allergens and showed a significant correlation to their native allergens. CONCLUSION We successfully produced native and recombinant group-1 and group-2 allergens. According to their allergenicities, recombinant Der p 2 and rDer f 2 have potential to replace native allergen in diagnostic and therapeutic extracts. Moreover, they can employ as a standard reagent to measure the amount of group 2 allergen in the environment by sandwich-ELISA and utilise this as an immunogen for MAb production.